I'm glad everyone is having fun with this! It's so easy to beat ourselves up over our perceived shortcomings, but rest assured - you aren't alone! We ALSO aren't getting in music, picture study, or composer study. And hey, I totally count PE as the children running around the house, dancing in the living room, and jumping on the beds. Totally. FWIW, we didn't do ANY history or science last year outside of informal read alouds of picture books (think Magic School Bus here folks!) We moved twice and I was pregnant. Enough said! It is getting done this year though :)!

Ugh. I know what you mean. I had to take my 7 year old to the ...GASP... brick and mortar bookstore so we could actually have her try to read the books when she was at the beginning of 2nd grade. It was very hard to find books for her. I think the MAIN reason is that most commercial readers are NOT phonetically leveled. They are based on those Dolch word lists or something... I'm so thankful for our A Beka readers during the early reader phases before they can tackle easy chapter books...they are phonetically leveled - praise God!

Oh boy. We totally aren't doing our memory work either...!!! I even forgot to list it on my opening post, but it's my biggest guilt inducer!

I think Rod and Staff English is pretty open-and-go for us as well.

All About Spelling Sonlight Cores for history Math Mammoth

I'm a natural language learner with very little knowledge of the 'rules' of English. I know a noun from an adjective, spell instinctually (it feels like), and read voraciously. But rules...I'm learning those along with my 7-year-old! I definitely don't understand diagramming, which is why we are using R & S English.

Okay - confession time here ladies! There are quite a few areas I feel like I should be covering, but that I'm having a hard time getting around to. Consider this my confession. We finished AAS 1, and I meant to start AAS 2, but for some reason I haven't yet. Art, we have a great program, but it isn't getting done. Dictation - why doesn't this make sense to me? Whew. Glad I got that off my chest! :lol: I did start teaching cursive today to DD #1 though, yay! Check another 'to do' off that big 'ole list. So, your turn....who's next? :D

Well, FWIW, the teacher's manual sample shows 78 lessons in the table of contents. The book recommends you work through them at your child's pace, whether that's one lesson a day, or one lesson a day - similar to the recommendations for AAS. So, it will vary :).

Something I'm learning (the hard way) is that in homeschooling sometimes we just DON'T KNOW things about ourselves as teachers. Sometimes things look or sound good on paper and in our heads, but when we actually get down to the daily crunch of it, it just doesn't work! We find that something drives us batty and we can't work around it, even though we liked the philosophy. Phonics Road was like this for me. I love, love, love the philosophy, all in oneness, moving on to Latin. All of it. BUT, there's no way I can teach from DVDs alone, NO WAY. I need semi-scripted, or grid-type plans to work from, I don't have time to fast forward/rewind the DVD again and again, trying to remember how to teach the 'w' for the day. Seriously. I never knew this about myself, but now I do! Learn, move on :).

If it is like AAS in that it is mastery-based (which I'm guessing it is), then this could vary from child to child. It might only be a few months of material based on your child. I don't think anyone KNOWS right now though, because it is a new program. Anyone jumping in now is doing so without the wealth of experience the Hive Mind normally brings to bear on almost any program under consideration :).

- I - want the puppet. So badly. "Okay Ro-Ro," says the puppet to my four-year-old. "A says a, a, a, a." I was demonstrating how it would work to my seven-year-old this morning! Sigh. She already knows most of her short sound/hard consonant phonograms. Still up in the air, but leaning towards splurging...:lol:

:iagree: Glad I'm not the only one. I need to get out more often! :auto:

Official response on the ChatterBee is 8 levels including this one, but they aren't all for teaching phonics. This is going to turn into a reading/comprehension/fluency program that goes up into high school apparently. I'm not sure how many levels they'll take to teach the phonics though.

AJTL = A Journey Through Learning

We are doing Knowledge Box Central for astronomy right now, and it is driving me bonkers. I have to look at three or four sections of paper to figure out what to print, when, and what to do once it's printed, and I have to scroll through the ENTIRE pdf to find the printables I need for that lesson. I don't think it's very well organized at all :(. Next time around I think I'll try AJTL. They have the BIG lapbooks though - one folder for EACH lesson (yes, that means up to 14 folders full of mini-books!), so you want to make sure your children really, really dig lapbooks.

I think we might be a bit strange. I don't use a formal handwriting program. I show the children how to make their letters, do some 'air writing' with our fingers and various other body parts (elbows, noses etc.) then we move directly to line-by-line copywork models. I watch them for a while to see that they are forming letters correctly. If they have questions, they ask me. That's it!

Yip, it's up, but no sample files yet. I wonder if the A-Z CD is similar to the AAS CD since we already have that. It looks like you could definitely pare down to basics, but I don't really WANT a 7 level reading program! Maybe someone can clarify for us :). I have a 4-year old who knows most of her short letter sounds and is FOREVER asking me to spell words for her. I'm looking at it with her in mind.

See post below...I wondered if it was a new program too, but wandered in on the off chance that this was a TOG thread. Looking for a TOG fix...gotta...have...TOG!!!

We are scoping out/planning to use TOG for grade 4, so we haven't used it yet, just done a LOT of research. Marcia Sommerville, the author of TOG does advocate that families who'd like to use TOG in the high school years start early, so they can learn how the system works, train their children using TOGs guidelines for independent learning, and learn the content THEMSELVES so they can be prepared to tackle socratic discussions with their children in junior and senior high. You'd still need to add math, science, and some LA though, it isn't an all in one program. We are planning to use it for history, geography, some of our read-alouds and readers (though we'll do more than they recommend), Bible (in year 1), and as they hit the older years, I want to incorporate philosophy, church history, government, and worldview on deeper levels - this is WHY I want to switch to TOG. I only have year 1, unit 1 so far, and Bible is integrated pretty well, but I don't think it is in the future years (except for bringing it in to examine history/philosophy etc. in light of God's word) because those years are all occurring after the Bible was completed. I'm sure a more experienced TOG mom will be by shortly :).

We've done AAS 1, but I've found that what REALLY helped the most was doing EASY, leveled readers. We used A Beka, it helps to use the phonograms IN CONTEXT, and made all the difference for my oldest when we stalled out :).

I think it's the real deal now! https://www.homeschoolbuyersco-op.org/index.php?option=com_hsbc_epp_order&Itemid=1447 They had us locked out for a while ;).

Me too, but I head into obsessive land fairly fast. :tongue_smilie:

So, how old is your oldest Monica, 6? I'd just work on reading, and let the rest of LA go ;). SL's LA could definitely be too much, it's certainly not WTM styled as far as developmental expectations go. We are doing Core K right now, my oldest is 7, almost 8. Once she really caught onto reading we started Rod and Staff English 2 for LA, we just do one lesson a day, so scheduling is easy peasy :). It definitely isn't expensive, very simple writing and grammar instruction. We also do do it ourselves WTM way copywork, narration, etc. Of course, that doesn't include spelling...don't ask me about that ;). Still trying to figure out what will work best for us.

We are going to start Prima Latina once we are done formal phonics - another month or two maybe. DD will ne newly 8 by then :).

I don't have boys, but what about the Little Britches series of books by Ralph Moody? The Littles? Stuart Little? My 7 year old is really enjoying the Trailblazers biographies (Christian, hist. fiction, adventurous). We also really dig the Knights of Arrethrae series (Christian allegorical fiction), admittedly written for YA, and higher than DDs reading level, but we read it aloud.